
Book 6 * 4 : 



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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



ODE TO MAZZINI 



THE SAVIOUR OF SOCIETY 



LIBERTY AND LOYALTY 



FOUR HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-SEVEN 

COPIES OF THIS WORK HAVE BEEN PRINTED 

FOR MEMBERS OF THE BIBLIOPHILE SOCIETY, AND 

TWO FOR COPYRIGHT PURPOSES. THE TYPE 

HAS BEEN DISTRIBUTED 



ODE TO MAZZINI 



THE SAVIOUR OF SOCIETY 



LIBERTY AND LOYALTY 



BY 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 



/ 



UNPUBLISHED MSS. 

DISCOVERED AMONG THE AUTHOR'S EFFECTS 

AFTER HIS DEATH 




PRINTED EXCLUSIVELY FOR MEMBERS OF 

THE BIBLIOPHILE SOCIETY 

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 

MCMXIII 






FKSSO& 
,04 

1813 



COPYRIGHT, 1913. BY 
THE BIBLIOPHILE SOCIETY 



©CU350234 f 



ODE TO MAZZINI 



PREFACE 

The Ode to Mazzini was found, after 
Swinburne's death, in an old copy-book, 
from which many leaves had already been 
torn, presumably by himself. His lifelong 
reluctance to copy his poems for the press 
makes it probable that this book had con- 
tained the various pieces which he contributed 
to Undergraduate Papers. Perhaps the re- 
moval of these loosened a page of the Ode 
to Mazzini, containing the close of strophe 
IV, and the whole of strophe V, for this, 
most unfortunately, has disappeared. It may 
be well to point out that at the time he wrote, 
and for long years to come, Swinburne seems 
to have had no personal knowledge of Mazzini. 
But he followed with ardent sympathy the 
propaganda of the friends of "Young Italy" 
in London, at the head of whose executive 
council stood the inspiring name of Walter 
Savage Landor. 

The original MS. contains no indication 
of date, and the generally rhetorical character 
of the poetry makes it at first sight impossible 
to obtain any such term. But on a close 
examination, one point after another becomes 
7 



luminous, and we can at length, with almost 
perfect confidence, date the composition of 
this ode within a few months. The first 
salient observation which the reader makes 
is concerned with strophe XVII, in which 
we learn that Poerio was still a prisoner 
when it was written. But Baron Carlo 
Poerio — whose case had been, in 1851, so 
eloquently brought before the English public 
by Gladstone, in his letters to Lord Aber- 
deen — was released from his prison on the 
"foul wild rocks" of the island of Nisida in 
December, 1858. This fact was widely 
known in England, and Swinburne would 
certainly have learned it. Moreover, had 
the ode been written subsequent to January, 
1858, it could not but have contained some 
reference to the attempt of Orsini, which 
so greatly embarrassed the action of Mazzini 
and rendered the policy of Sardinia so difficult. 
Strophe VII, with its strange reference to 
the "priestly hunters," and the close of 
strophe IX, are intelligible only in reference 
to Cavour's attempts to encourage the Pa- 
pacy in its efforts, half-hearted enough, to 
check the violence of Austria and the guilt 
of Naples. In this connection, the reader 
of today may be surprised to find no ac- 
8 



knowledgment of the services of the great 
"regenerator of Italy." But Swinburne, all 
through his life, was unjust to Gavour, be- 
cause of his monarchical tendencies, as were 
at the moment the leaders of "Young Italy," 
with Mazzini himself at their head. It is 
observable that the notion of the one and 
indivisible Republic, which pervades and 
animates Songs before Sunrise from begin- 
ning to end, is not suggested in the Ode to 
Mazzini. Swinburne had not as yet accepted 
such an idea; in 1857 his own boyish hopes 
were bounded, as were the more adult desires 
of Mazzini, by the frontiers of Italy. 

The moment when the ode was written 
must have been early in 1857. Sardinia was 
provoking Austria to a violent act, so as to 
make war inevitable; the house of Naples 
was filling the cup of its iniquities; "out of 
a court alive with creeping things" the 
stiletto of Agesilao Milano had flashed on 
the 8th of December, 1856, but had failed 
to slay the detestable Bomba, a disappoint- 
ment obscurely referred to in the latter part 
of strophe XIII. On the 16th of March, 1857, 
Vienna could bear no longer the violent at- 
tacks of the Italian Press on Austrian tyranny 
in Lombardy, and the Ambassador with- 
9 



drew from Turin. Mazzini immediately left 
London, where he had resided since he fled 
from Rome, and descended once more upon 
Italy. He found distraction among the 
friends of the Republic and hope dying out 
"like a forgotten tale." At this moment, 
almost without question, Swinburne com- 
posed his Ode to Mazzini, in the hour of 
suspense. The careful reader will not fail 
to observe that the poet has not as yet heard 
of any acts which Mazzini has performed on 
the soil of Italy. Had the insurrections at 
Genoa (June, 1857) and Leghorn occurred, 
or had the attack on Naples, led by Pisacane, 
Mazzini's friend, been made, the poet must 
have celebrated them in his verse. 

Everything, then, tends to show that 
Swinburne composed this ode in the spring 
of 1857. He was just twenty years of age, 
and this was, with all its puerile shortcom- 
ings, the most powerful and accomplished 
work which he had written up to that time. 
We are therefore met by the question: Why 
did he publish it neither then, nor later? 
For this an answer is readily forthcoming. 
In 1B57 he had no means of publishing any- 
thing, except the slight and imitative verses 
which he presently contributed to Under- 
10 



graduate Papers. For that ephemeral peri- 
odical, the ode to Mazzini was eminently 
unfitted. But the tide of history was run- 
ning fast, and the lyric visions of 1857 were 
soon left high and dry on the shore of time. 
After the diplomatic isolation of Austria in 
1858, after the war ending with the Peace 
of Villafranca in July, 1859, after the death 
of Bomba and the capture of the Two Sicilies 
by Garibaldi in 1860, Swinburne's wild and 
vague aspirations became hopelessly old- 
fashioned. The interest of this ode being 
temporary, its political purpose had ceased 
to exist. 

Another reason why, when Swinburne 
became a prominent poet, he could not pub- 
lish the Ode to Mazzini may be found in its 
form. It is an irregular ode, of the Pindar- 
esque sort, on the model which was invented 
by Cowley, and constantly employed during 
the close of the seventeenth century, but 
exposed, in a brilliant and learned essay, by 
Congreve, as founded on a total misconcep- 
tion of the law of Pindar's prosody. Later 
Swinburne perceived the falsity of the 
Pindaresque ode, and his mature poems are 
types of disciplined evolution. There were 
therefore reasons of various kinds, external 
11 



and internal, why the Ode to Mazzini, if not 
printed soon after it was written, could not 
be printed by Swinburne at all. Its recovery, 
however, is of extreme interest to all students 
of the development of his genius, and the 
accidental destruction of a page from the 
middle of it cannot be sufficiently deplored. 

Edmund Gosse 



12 



ODE TO MAZZINI 



A voice comes from the far unsleeping years, 
An echo from the rayless verge of time, 
Harsh, laden with the weight of kingly 
crime, 
Whose soul is stained with blood and blood- 
like tears: 
And hearts made hard and blind with endless 
pain, 
And eyes too dim to bear 
The light of the free air, 
And hands no longer restless in the wonted 
chain, 
And valiant lives worn out 
By silence and the doubt 
That comes with hope found weaponless and 
vain; 
All these cry out to thee, 
As thou to Liberty, 
All, looking up to thee, take heart and life 
again. 

ii 
Too long the world has waited. Year on year 

Has died in voiceless fear 
Since Tyranny began the silent ill, 
And Slaughter satiates yet her ravenous will. 
13 



Surely the time is near — 

The dawn grows wide and clear; 
And fiercer beams than pave the steps of day 

Pierce all the brightening air 

And in some nightly lair 
The keen white lightning hungers for his prey; 

Against his chain the growing thunder 
yearns, 

With hot swift pulses all the silence burns, 
And the earth hears and maddens with delay. 

in 
Dost thou not hear thro' the hushed heart 

of night 
The voices wailing for thy help, thy sight, 
The souls that call their lord? 
"We want the voice, the sword, 
We want the hand to strike, the love to share 

The weight we cannot bear; 
The soul to point our way, the heart to do 
and dare. 
We want the unblinded eye, 
The spirit pure and high, 
And consecrated by enduring care: 
For now we dare not meet 
The memories of the past; 
They wound us with their glories bright and 
fleet, 
The fame that would not last, 
The hopes that were too sweet; 
14 



A voice of lamentation 
Shakes the high places of the throned nation, 
The crownless nation sitting wan and bare 

Upon the royal seat." 

iv * 
Too long the world has waited. Day by day 

The noiseless feet of murder pass and stain 

Palace and prison, street and loveliest plain, 
And the slow life of freedom bleeds away. 

Still bleached in sun and rain, 

Lie the forgotten slain 

* In the MS., Stanza IV originally began as fol- 
lows : — 

Too long the world has waited. Day by day 
Fresh murders ease the thirst of widening sway: 

And still their blood who lie without a shroud 
Cries from the desolate Apennine aloud. 

Left to the wild bleak air, 

As they were slaughtered there, 

Father and children lain 

A white bleak pile of slain, 
Left to the sunlight and the freezing rain. 

Thro' blood-polluted halls 

Still the king-serpent sprawls 
His shiny way athwart the floors defiled; 

From that foul nest of sin 

His soul sits cowering in 
Still creeps and stings his anger blind and wild. 

Still from that loathsome lair, etc. 
Swinburne evidently cancelled these lines, as being 
too violent to represent anything that was happening 
in 1857. 

15 



On bleak slopes of the dismal mountain-range. 

Still the wide eagle-wings 

Brood o'er the sleep of Kings, 
Whose purples shake not in the wind of 
change. 

Still our lost land is beautiful in vain, 

Where priests and kings defile with blood 
and lies 

The glory of the inviolable skies; 

Still from that loathsome lair 

Where crawls the sickening air, 
Heavy with poison, stagnant as despair, 
Where soul and body moulder in one chain 

Of inward-living pain: 
From wasted lives, and hopes proved un- 
availing; 

In utterance harsh and strange, 

With many a fitful change, 

In laughter and in tears, 

In triumph and in fears, — * 



VI 

Out of a court alive with creeping things 

A stench has risen to thicken and pollute 
The inviolate air of heaven that clad of yore 
Our Italy with light, because these Kings 
Gather like wasps about the tainted fruit, 

* A page of the MS. containing the close of strophe 
IV and the whole of strophe V is lost. 
16 



And eat their venomous way into its core, 
And soil with hateful hands its golden hue; 

Till on the dead branch clings 
A festering horror blown with poison dew; 

Then laugh. So Freedom loses her last name 
And Italy is shamed with our shame! 
For blindness holds them still 
And lust of craving will: 
A mist is on their souls who cannot see 
The ominous light, nor hear the fateful 
sounds; 
Who know not of the freedom that shall be, 
And was, ere Austria loosed her winged 
hounds 
These double beaked and bloody-plumaged 

things, 
Whose shadow is the hiding-place of Kings. 

VII 

Behold, even they whose shade is black 
around, 
Whose names make dumb the nations in 
their hate, 
Tremble to other tyrants; Naples bows 
Aghast, and Austria cowers like a scourged 
hound 
Before the priestly hunters: 'tis their fate, 
Whose fear is as a brand-mark on men's 
brows, 

17 



Themselves to shrink beneath a fiercer dread: 
The might of ancient error 
Round royal spirits folds its shroud of 
terror, 
And at a name the imperial soul is dead. 
Rome! as from thee the primal curse came 
forth 
So comes the retribution: 
As the flushed murderers of the ravening 
north 
Crouch for thine absolution. 
Exalt thyself, that love or fear of thee 
Hath shamed thine Austrian bondsmen, 
and their shame 
Avenges the vext spirits of the free, 
Repays the trustless lips, the bloody hands, 
And all the sin that makes the Austrian 
name 
A bye-word among liars — fit to be 
Thy herald, Rome, among the wasted 
lands! 

VIII 

For wheresoe'er thou lookest death is there, 
And a slow curse that stains the sacred air: 
Such as must hound Italia till she learn 
Whereon to lean the weight of reverent 
trust; 
Learn to see God within her, and not bare 
Her glories to the ravenous eyes of lust; 
18 



Vain of this honour that proclaims her fair. 

Such insolence of listless pride must earn 

The scourge of Austria — till mischance 

in turn 

Defile her eagles with fresh blood and dust. 

For tho' the faint heart burn 
In silence: yet a sullen flame is there 
Which yet may leap into the sunless air 
And gather in the embrace of its wide wings 
The shining spoil of kings. 

IX 

But now the curse lies heavy. Where art 

thou, 
Our Italy, among all these laid low 
Too powerless or too desperate to 
speak — 
Thou, robed in purple for a priestly show, 
Thou, buffetted and stricken, blind and 
weak! 
Doth not remembrance light thine utter woe? 
Thine eyes beyond this Calvary look, altho* 
Brute-handed Austria smite thee on the 

cheek 
And her thorns pierce thy forehead, white 
and meek; 
In lurid mist half-strangled sunbeams pine, 
Yet purer than the flame of tainted altars; 
And tho' thy weak hope falters, 
It clings not to the desecrated shrine. 
19 



Tho' thy blank eyes look wanly thro' dull 

tears, 
And thy weak soul is heavy with blind 
fears, 
Yet art thou greater than thy sorrow is, 
Yet is thy spirit nobler than of yore, 
Knowing the keys thy reverence used to kiss 
Were forged for emperors to bow down 
before, 
Not for free men to worship: So that Faith, 
Blind portress of the gate that opens Death, 
Shall never prate of Freedom any more; 
For on a priest's tongue such a word is 
strange, 
And when they laud who did but now 

revile, 
Shall we believe? Rome's lying lips defile 
The graves of heroes, giving us in change 
Enough of Saints and Bourbons. Dare 
ye now 
Receive her who speaks pleasant words and 

bland 
And stretches out the blessing of her hand 
While the pure blood of freemen stains her 
brow? 
dream not of such reconcilement! Be 

At least in spirit free 
When the great sunrise floods your glorious 
land. 



20 



X 

For yet the dawn is lingering white and far 
And dim its guiding star; 
There is a sorrow in the speechless air, 
And in the sunlight a dull painful glare; 

The winds that fold around 

Her soft enchanted ground 
Their wings of music, sadden into song: 

The holy stars await 

Some dawn of glimmering fate 
In silence — but the time of pain is long, 

But here no comfort stills 
This sorrow that o'erclouds the purple hills. 

XI 

The sun is bright, and fair the foamless sea; 
The winds are loud with light and liberty: 

But when shall these be free? 
These hearts that beat thro' stifled pain, 

these eyes 
Strained thro' dim prison air toward the free 
skies : 
When shall their light arise? 

XII 

Thou! whose best name on earth 
Is love — whose fairest birth 
The freedom of the fair world thou hast made ; 
Whose light in heaven is life, 
Whose rest above our strife — 
21 



Whose bright sky overvaults earth's barren 

shade; 
Who hearest all ere this weak prayer can rise. 

Before whose viewless eyes 
Unrolled and far the starry future lies, 
Behold what men have done, 
What is beneath thy sun, 
What stains the sceptred hand sin lifts to thee 

In prayer-like mockery: 
What binds the heart thou madest to be free. 
Since we are blind, give light; 
Since we are feeble, smite. 
How long shall man be scornful in thy sight, 
Fear not, He cares not, or He does not see! 

XIII 

We keep our trust tho' all things fail us: 

Tho' Time nor baffled hope avail us, 
We keep our faith — God liveth and is love. 

Not one groan rises there 

Tho' choked in dungeon air 
But He has heard it, though no thunders 
move, 

And though no help is here. 

No royal oath, no Austrian lie 

But echoes in the listening sky; 
We know not, yet perchance his wide reply 
Is near. 

Ah, let no sloth delay, 

No discord mar its way, 
22 



Keep wide the entrance for that Hope divine; 
Truth never wanted swords, 
Since with his swordlike words 
Savonarola smote the Florentine. 
Even here she is not weaponless but waits, 

Silent at the palace gates, 
Her wide eyes kindling eastward to the far 

sunshine. 
When out of Naples came a tortured voice 
Whereat the whole earth shuddered, and 

forbade 
The murderous smile on lying lips to fade, 
The murderous heart in silence to rejoice: 
She also smiled — no royal smile — as knowing 
Some stains of sloth washed by the blood 
then flowing, 
Their lives went out in darkness, not in vain ; 
Earth cannot hear, and sink to bloodless rest 
again. 
And if indeed her waking strength shall 
prove 
Worthy the dreams that passing lit her 
sleep, 
Who then shall lift such eyes of triumph, who 

Respond with echoes of a louder love 
Than Cromwell's England? Let fresh praise 

renew 
The wan brow's withered laurels with its dew, 
And one triumphal peace the crowned earth 
shall keep. 

23 



XIV 

As one who dreaming on some cloud-white 
peak 
Hears the loud wind sail past him far and 

free 
And the faint music of the misty sea, 
Listening till all his life reels blind and weak; 
So discrowned Italy 
With the world's hope in her hands 

Ever yearning to get free, 
Silent between the past and future stands. 
Dim grows the past, and dull, 
All that was beautiful, 
As scattered stars drawn down the moonless 
night: 
And the blind eyes of scorn 
Are smitten by strange morn 
And many-throned treason wastes before its 
might : 
And every sunless cave 
And time-forgotten grave 
Is pierced with one intolerable light. 
Not one can falsehood save 
Of all the crowns she gave: 
But the dead years renew their old delight; 
The worshipped evil wanes 
Thro' all its godless fanes 
And falters from its long imperial height, 
As the last altar-flame 
Dies with a glorious nation's dying shame. 
24 



XV 

And when that final triumph-time shall be, 

Whose memory shall be kept 

First of the souls that slept 
In death ere light was on their Italy? 

Or who more dear than thee 

To equal-thoughted liberty, 
Whom here on earth such reverence greets, 
Such love from Jieaven's free spirit meets 

As few dare win among the free? 

Such honour ever follows thee 
In peril, banishment and blame, 
And all the loud blind world calls shame, 
Lives and shall live, thy glorious name, 
Tho' death, that scorns the robed slave, 
Embrace thee, and a chainless grave. 

While thou livest, there is one 

Free in soul beneath the sun: 
And thine outlaboured heart shall be 
In death more honoured, not more free. 

XVI 

And men despond around thee, and thy name 
The tyrant smiles at, and his priests look 
pale; 
And weariness of empty-throated fame 
And men who live and fear all things but 
shame 
Comes on thee, and the weight of aimless 
years 

25 



Whose light is dim with tears; 

And hope dies out, like a forgotten tale. 
brother, crowned among men, chief 

In glory as in grief! 
throned by sorrow over time and fate 

And the blind strength of hate! 
From soul to answering soul 

The thunder-echoes roll, 
And truth grows out of suffering still and 

great. 
To have done well is victory, to be true 
Is truest guerdon, tho' blind hands undo 

The work begun too late, 
God gives to each man power by toil to earn 

An undishonoured grave: 
The praise that lives on every name in turn 

He leaves the laurelled slave. 
We die, but freedom dies not like the power 
That changes with the many-sided hour, 
Tho' trampled under the brute hoofs of crime, 

She sees thro' tears and blood, 
Above the stars and in the night of time, 

The sleepless watch of God; 
Past fear and pain and errors wide and strange 
The veiled years leading wingless-footed 
change; 

Endure, and they shall give 
Truth and the law whereby men work and 
live. 



26 



XVII 

From Ischia to the desolate Apennine 
Time's awful voice is blown: 
And from her clouded throne 
Freedom looks out and knows herself divine. 
From walls that keep in shame 
Poerio's martyr-name, 
From wild rocks foul with children's blood, 
it rings: 
Their murderers gaze aghast 
Thro' all the hideous past, 
And fate is heavy on the souls of Kings. 
No more their hateful sway 
Pollutes the equal day, 
Nor stricken truth pales under its wide wings, 
Even when the awakened people speaks in 
wrath, 
Wrong shall not answer wrong in blinding 
patience; 
The bloody slime upon that royal path 
Makes slippery standing for the feet of 
nations. 
Our freedom's bridal robe no wrong shall 
stain; 
No lie shall taint her speech; 
But equal knowledge shall be born of pain, 

And wisdom shaping each. 
True leaders shall be with us, nobler laws 
Shall guide us calmly to the final Cause: 
And thou, earth's crownless queen, 
27 



No more shalt wail unseen, 
But front the weary ages without pain: 

Time shall bring back for thee 

The hopes that lead the free, 
And thy name fill the charmed world again. 

The shame that stains thy brow 
Shall not for ever mark thee to fresh fears: 
For in the far light of the buried years 

Shines the undarkened future that shall be 

A dawn o'er sunless ages. Hearest thou, 
Italia? tho' deaf sloth hath sealed thine ears, 
The world has heard thy children, and God 
hears. 



28 



THE SAVIOUR OF SOCIETY 



PREFACE 

The discovery, since Swinburne's death, 
of the original MS. of his letter to The Ex- 
aminer of the 7th of June, 1873, has revived 
the memory of a controversy which had been 
almost entirely forgotten, abandoned to the 
files of a couple of newspapers. As the 
matter presents very considerable historic 
and literary interest, and as Swinburne's 
attitude throughout is characteristic of his 
mind during its most vigorous and combat- 
ive period, it has been thought well to col- 
lect from various sources the documents 
which illustrate it. A careful collation of 
the MS. (which seems to have been writ- 
ten on the 1st of June), with the version 
printed in The Examiner, shows in the lat- 
ter some unimportant revisions; these, as 
evidently made by the author in proof, have 
been respected here. The Latin motto was 
an afterthought. 

Swinburne's extreme and unwavering de- 
testation of Napoleon III was a remarkable 
characteristic of his temper. It dated back 
to his childhood, and was no doubt con- 
nected with the actual circumstances of the 
31 



coup <T£tat of December 2, 1851. He was 
at that time at Eton, a schoolboy of four- 
teen, and it was in the earliest period of the 
new dictature that Swinburne visited Paris 
with his parents. He was wont, in after 
years, to tell anecdotes which showed that 
already at that tender age he comprehended 
the infamy of the Vulture. Swinburne's 
attitude, however, was certainly confirmed 
by the example of Victor Hugo ; and an inter- 
esting question for his biographers to decide 
will be, at what moment did the poetical 
satires of the French master pass into the 
hands of the English neophyte? The dates 
seem to make it possible that the lesson was 
early learned. "Napoleon le Petit" was 
printed in August, 1852, "Les Chatiments," 
sent from Jersey, appeared in Brussels in 
October, 1853, and in Paris in December of 
the same year. Nothing is at present known 
which prevents us from believing that Swin- 
burne became immediately acquainted with 
these works. 

Swinburne probably first learned from 
Victor Hugo's angry irony that Napoleon III 
was called "The Saviour of Society." The 
editor of The Spectator, in 1873, seems to have 
supposed that Swinburne invented the title. 
32 



As a matter of fact, it was coeval with the 
coup d'etat. It became a general cry through- 
out the next year of Napoleonic triumph. 
During his progress from the south in Septem- 
ber, 1852, Louis Bonaparte was welcomed 
in terms of obsequious flattery at the gate 
of one city after another. It was left, how- 
ever, to the citizens of Beziers to hail him 
with banners inscribed "Napoleon, Sauveur 
de la Propriete." Perhaps this was the 
earliest direct annunciation of what had long 
been in the dictator's mind, for at Bordeaux 
on the 9th of October he accepted the title, 
and said that Society was hurrying to its 
destruction, but "fai sauve' le vaisseau en 
arborant seulement le drapeau de France." 
After the plebiscite of November, and before 
his proclamation as Emperor, he announced 
in Notre Dame, "J'ai same* Vordre." These 
exclamations and protestations had the effect 
of rousing the Muse of Victor Hugo to frenzy, 
and nothing that Swinburne has written 
exceeds in virulence some of the attacks 
made by the great exile from Jersey; such, 
for example, as the — 

Toi, tu te noieras dans la fange. 
Petit, petit, 
33 



of September, 1853, the denunciations of 
Neron-Scapin, or the almost inconceivable 
violence of the poem beginning: — 

Quand Veunuque regnait a cote du Cesar. 

In January, 1873, Napoleon III died, in 
pain and obscurity, at Chislehurst. For 
three years he had ceased to be a power for 
good or for evil. France partly forgave him, 
and even Victor Hugo forgot him. But 
Swinburne neither forgot nor forgave, and 
it seemed as just to execrate this man six 
months after his death as it had been six 
years before it. The truth was that to the 
transcendental English poet Napoleon was 
not a man, but a symbol. All that the 
Christians in Rome thought of Nero, Swin- 
burne thought of Louis Bonaparte; to him 
the name represented tyranny in its feeblest, 
its most cruel, its most treacherous and de- 
bauched manifestation. History has not 
judged Napoleon III as either the French 
or the English poet judged him, and even 
in 1873, voices of protest were raised in 
places which Swinburne himself could not 
accuse of want of liberalism. He had charged 
Matthew Arnold with being the Athanasius 
of democracy; Arnold is said to have retorted 
34 



in private that that was better than being 
its Ernulphus. 

It is interesting to note that the censure 
and the defence which we reprint were in 
each case almost certainly the writing of 
distinguished men. The editor of The Ex- 
aminer, in the summer of 1873, was still Fox 
Bourne, but the literary opinions of the paper 
were already in the hands of William Minto, 
who became editor a few months later. On 
the other hand, it cannot be doubted that the 
rebuke in The Spectator came from the pen of 
Richard Holt Hutton. This would be pecul- 
iarly galling to Swinburne, because the arrival 
of Hutton on that paper, of which he became 
half-proprietor and sole literary editor in June, 
1863, had been the signal for the opening of 
the columns of The Spectator to Swinburne's 
writings in prose and verse. For years Hut- 
ton was the only editor who welcomed him, 
and when we reflect that not merely "Faus- 
tine" and the essay on Baudelaire, but even 
such lyrics as A Song in Time of Revolution had 
been published by The Spectator when they 
could be printed nowhere else, Swinburne's 
annoyance is intelligible. But he and Hutton 
had parted ways in 1866, over Poems and 
Ballads. Edmund Gosse 

35 



THE SAVIOUR OF SOCIETY 

On the 17th of May, 1873, The Examiner 
published the following sonnets by Algernon 
Charles Swinburne. They had been com- 
posed in December, 1869, and formed part 
of the satiric sequence called "Dirae:" 

THE SAVIOUR OF SOCIETY 



son of man, but of what man who knows? 
That broughtest healing on thy leathern 

wings 
To priests, and under them didst gather 
kings, 
And madest friends to thee of all man's foes; 
Before thine incarnation, the tale goes, 
Thy virgin mother, pure of sensual stings, 
Communed by night with angels of chaste 
things, 
And, full of grace, untimely felt the throes 
Of motherhood upon her, and believed 
The obscure annunciation made when late 
A raven-feathered, raven-throated dove 
Croaked salutation to the mother of love 
Whose misconception was immaculate, 
And when her time was come she miscon- 
ceived. 

36 



II 

Thine incarnation was upon this wise, 
Saviour; and out of east and west were led 
To thy foul cradle by thy planet red 
Shepherds of souls that feed their sheep with 

lies 
Till the utter soul die as the body dies, 
And the wise men that ask but to be fed 
Though the hot shambles be their board 
and bed 
And sleep on any dunghill shut their eyes, 
So they lie warm and fatten in the mire: 
And the high priest enthroned yet in thy 
name 
Judas, baptised thee with men's blood for hire 
And now thou hangest nailed to thine own 

shame 
In sight of all time, but while heaven has 
flame 
Shalt find no resurrection from hell-fire. 

On the following Saturday, May 24, 1873, 
The Spectator made this reference to the 
death of John Stuart Mill (May 8th, 1873) 
and to Swinburne's sonnets: — 

The Examiner of last week had no less 
than fifteen distinct and individual tributes 
to the merits, personal, philosophical, scien- 
tific, and otherwise, of the late Mr. John 
37 



Stuart Mill, of which Mr. Thornton's remi- 
niscences of him during his career at the 
India House, and Professor Cairnes's esti- 
mate of his writings on political economy, 
were perhaps the best. Two very fine illus- 
trations of his delicate generosity, and one 
of his cool indifference to literary reputation, 
are given in these papers. 

. . . Evidently Mr. Mill was capable of 
feeling more kindly for his friends than for 
himself, and The Examiner has done a public 
service in publishing these records. But 
surely it was hardly fair either to Mr. Mill 
or his friends to place their eager and some- 
times tender tributes to his memory in 
immediate proximity to Mr. Swinburne's 
revolting lines headed "Dirae," which, 
whatever else they mean or do not mean, 
certainly do mean a deadly and indecent 
insult to the faith of the vast majority of 
Christians. The mourners round a great 
man's grave, even though he were a great 
sceptic, should hardly be jostled by so pro- 
fane and vulgar a companion as Mr. Swin- 
burne permits himself to be, in this horrible 
attempt to outrage the most tender and 
sensitive of religious associations. 



38 



On the same day, The Examiner printed 
another of the "Dirae" sonnets, — 

mentana: third anniversary 

i 

Such prayers last year were put up for thy 
sake; 
What shall this year do that hath lived to 

see 
The piteous and unpitied end of thee? 
What moan, what cry, what clamour shall it 

make, 

Seeing as a reed breaks all thine empire break, 

And all thy great strength as a rotten tree, 

Whose branches made broad night from 

sea to sea, 

And the world shuddered when a leaf would 

shake? 
From the unknown deep wherein those 

prayers were heard, 
From the dark height of time there sounds a 
word, 
Crying, Comfort, though death ride on 
this red hour, 
Hope waits with eyes that make the 
morning dim, 
Till liberty, reclothed with love and power, 
Shall pass and know not if she tread on 
him. 

39 



II 

The hour for which men hungered and had 

thirst, 

And dying were loth to die before it came, 

Is it indeed upon thee? and the lame 

Late foot of vengeance on thy trace accurst 

For years insepulchred and crimes inhearsed, 

For days marked red or black with blood 

or shame, 
Hath it outrun thee to tread out thy name? 
This scourge, this hour, is this indeed the 

worst? 
clothed and crowned with curses, canst 
thou tell? 
Have thy dead whispered to thee what 

they see 
Whose eyes are open in the dark on thee 
Ere spotted soul and body take farewell 

Or what of life beyond the worms may be 
Satiate the immitigable hours in hell? 

To this the following note was appended: — 
We regret that some of our readers should 
have misunderstood the purport and object 
of the two sonnets by Mr. Swinburne, which 
were printed in the last number of The Ex- 
aminer, They form the first pair of some 
sonnets on Louis Napoleon, of which the 
continuation is given above. In reminding 
40 



those correspondents and critics who have 
found fault with us that The Examiner, 
especially in the case of signed articles, 
allows considerable divergence of thought, 
and yet more of expression, on the part of 
its contributors, we do not wish to shake off 
the responsibility attaching to us for issuing 
these lines. Had it occurred to us that any 
one, missing the application which the title 
and the date seemed sufficiently to indicate, 
would suppose that they were intended 
merely to throw ridicule and contempt upon 
persons and traditions that are held sacred 
by some Christians, we would have attempted 
to make the matter clear by a note appended 
to the sonnets in the column containing 
them. At the same time we would suggest 
to those who have blamed us, that the 
Christians who systematically scoff and sneer 
at all other religions than their own, who 
wantonly misrepresent such great systems 
of belief as are held by the Hindoos and other 
nations, and who give utterance to their 
sentiments in such language as was employed 
last week by the Church Herald concerning 
Mr. John Stuart Mill, have no right to com- 
plain if others imitate their use of strong 
language. — Ed. Ex. 

41 



A week later, Swinburne addressed the 
following letter to The Spectator (May 31st, 
1873): — 

Sir, — I do not write to defend myself 
against the remarks in your journal called 
forth by my sonnets in The Examiner of 
May 17th, on Louis Napoleon. It is to me 
a matter of absolute indifference whether 
or not you may see fit to publish the dis- 
claimer of the imputations made on them 
which I think it worth while to address to 
you. I do not believe that any man who 
reads my verses can doubt, or can otherwise 
than wilfully and malignantly misinterpret, 
the feeling which inspired them, and which 
they strive, though most inadequately and 
imperfectly, to express. That feeling is the 
simple one of disgust at the insult — I might 
honestly say, and fear no misconstruction 
from any honest man, of horror at the blas- 
phemy — offered to the name and memory 
or tradition of Christ by the man who, in 
gratitude for the support given to the Church 
by Louis Bonaparte and his empire, bestowed 
on the most infamous of all public criminals 
the names till then reserved for one whom 
they professed to worship as God, of "Sav- 
iour" and "Messiah." To confute the im- 
42 



becile dishonesty — for by no utmost stretch 
of charity can I assume it to be honest 
imbecility — which would bring against me 
the calumnious charge of a similar insult or 
blasphemy on my own account, I need not 
remind any one who and what they were 
who first hailed the sons of Hortense by the 
titles of the Son of Mary. It is not, in my 
humble opinion, necessary to subscribe to 
the creeds or articles of any Church to earn 
the right of feeling and of expressing horror 
and disgust at this desecration of terms 
which must in some sense be sacred to all 
who have any faith or hope in the higher 
life of man, if it were only for their associa- 
tion with so much that was most noble, most 
venerable, and most precious in the past 
records of that life. And this, and nothing 
else, is the feeling expressed in my sonnets; 
feebly expressed indeed, but at least in terms 
as bitter and as strong as could be supplied 
by my reverence for the associations thus 
outraged, and my indignation at once against 
the perpetrators of the outrage and against 
the object of their hideous adulation. There 
are two classes of men to whom I can im- 
agine that my expressions may reasonably 
give offence, as uncalled for or improper; 
43 



those to whom the name of Christ and all 
memories connected with it are hateful, and 
those to whom the name of Bonaparte and 
all memories connected with it are not. I 
belong to neither class. 

I am, Sir, &c, 

A. C. Swinburne. 
Balliol College, Oxford, 
May 25th, 1873. 

To this the editor of The Spectator appended 
the following note: — 

We should not have dreamt of referring 
to the character of Mr. Swinburne's sonnets, 
had we not feared that Mr. John Stuart 
Mill's reputation would be injured in the eyes 
of unthinking persons by the close associa- 
tion of the high estimates formed of him by 
his friends with so gross a parody on the 
most sacred of subjects as Mr. Swinburne 
had written. As we should not choose to 
print the sonnets in these columns, we must 
leave our readers without the means of judg- 
ing of the justice of a remark which we think 
was mild, rather than harsh. Of "wilful 
malignity" and "imbecile dishonesty" Mr. 
Swinburne probably does not now, even in 
his own heart, accuse us, and we can allow 
44 



for his discontent, partly perhaps with us, 
and still more, though less consciously, with 
himself. — Ed. Spectator. 

On the same day, a long note containing 
substantially what Mr. Swinburne had writ- 
ten to The Spectator appeared in The Exam- 
iner, underneath two more of the "Dirae" 
sonnets, — 

mentana: second anniversary 

Est-ce qu'il n'est pas temps que la foudre se prouve, 
Gieux profonds, en broyant ce chien, fils de la louve? 

La Legende des Siecles : — Rathbert. 
Is it not time for the thunderbolt to show its force, 
Oh ye heavenly depths, and blast this dog, son of the 
she-wolf? 

I 
By the dead body of Hope, the spotless lamb 
Thou threwest into the high priest's 

slaughtering-room, 
And by the child Despair born red there- 
from 
As, thank the secret sire picked out to cram 
With spurious spawn thy misconceiving dam, 
Thou, like a worm from a town's common 

tomb, 
Didst creep from forth the kennel of her 
womb, 

45 



Born to break down with catapult and ram 
Man's builded towers of promise, and with 

breath 
And tongue to track and hunt his hopes to 
death: 
0,by that sweet dead body abused and slain, 
And by that child mismothered, — dog, by all 
Thy curses thou hast cursed mankind withal, 
With what curse shall man curse thee back 
again? 

ii 
By the brute soul that made man's soul its 
fool; 
By time grown poisonous with it; by the 

hate 
And horror of all souls not miscreate; 
By the hour of power that evil hath on good; 
And by the incognizable fatherhood 
Which made a whorish womb the shame- 
ful gate 
That opening let out loose to fawn on fate 
A hound half-blooded ravening for man's 

blood; 
(What prayer but this for thee should any say, 
Thou dog of hell, but this that Shake- 
speare said?) 
By night deflowered and desecrated day, 

That fall as one curse on one cursed head, 
* Cancel his bond of life, dear God, I pray, 
That I may live to say, The dog is dead!' 
46 



The above sonnets should have been pub- 
lished last week in precedence of the two 
entitled "Mentana: Third Anniversary," 
that were then given. They were withheld 
in order that before printing them we might 
have an opportunity of communicating with 
their author. "After the wilful misinterpre- 
tation of the allusions in The Saviour of 
Society" Mr. Swinburne writes to us, "I 
suppose it will be hopeless to expect that the 
continuous references to the text of Shake- 
speare in these sonnets will not be overlooked 
or misconstrued. They are all taken from 
Act IV, scene iv, of Richard III. — 

From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept 
A hell-hound that doth hunt us all to death, etc. 

"The allusion to the whole passage and to 
other parts of the same scene will, of course, 
be appreciated at once by the student of 
Shakespeare; but I find it impossible for any 
foresight to calculate on the possible depth of 
some readers' ignorance and malevolence." 

As others may have drawn from our note 
on this subject last week an inference that 
we did not intend it to convey, we gladly 
quote also the following sentences from Mr. 
Swinburne's letter: 

47 



"I very much wish you had not seen fit, 
as it were by way of apology for the appear- 
ance of my verses, to refer as you did to the 
outrage of the Church Herald on the memory 
of Mr. Mill. Had any such insult to a name 
as justly revered by any religious body as 
synonymous with genius and goodness — 
say, for example, to that of Dr. Newman or 
of Mr. Keble — appeared in the columns of 
The Examiner, or any other organ of opinions 
alien to those of such men as these, I would 
have felt, and I cannot doubt that you would 
have felt with me, even greater indignation 
and disgust at such infamy on the part of 
men who profess to think with us than on 
the part of some wretched cur who holds free 
thought and noble speech in abhorrence. It 
was remarked with regret by others than 
myself that the unlucky turn of the last 
sentence in your note appeared to imply and 
to justify the admission into your columns 
of some similar outrage offered by me to the 
feelings of others; a charge than which I 
can imagine none more horrible to me, or 
more repugnant to my practice." 

Finally, Swinburne addressed to The Ex- 
aminer for June 7, 1873, the following letter, 
48 



entitled by the editor of that paper, not by 
the writer: — 

CHRISTIANITY and IMPERIALISM 

Praesens Christus habebitur 

Augustus adjecto Britannis 

Imperio 

Sir, — Though I am by no means usually 
inclined to trouble myself or others about so 
small a personal matter as the favour or 
disfavour which any writing of mine may 
find in the sight of reviewers who honestly 
confine themselves to literary criticism, I 
think it well not always to keep silence when 
the point at issue, however unimportant, is 
not a matter of opinion but a matter of fact. 
No habit of mind is to me more pitiable and 
more unintelligible than that of some poor 
creature of genius or other who lives as it 
were on the lips of his critics, who cannot 
breathe at ease but by their leave, who holds 
his peace of mind and happiness on such a 
tenure as the free and fortunate English 
labourer holds his humble but happy home, 
tenant at will of any fool or any foe; whom 
a word spoken can deprive of rest, or a pen 
lifted can throw into hysterical agonies: a 
49 



price at which the genius of Shakespeare or 
of Dante would be too dearly bought, were 
it possible that such genius should keep house 
with such degradation. It is not under the 
irritation of this spiritual skin-disease of 
sensitive vanity, twin-born in so many a 
suffering poeticule with self-contempt and 
envy, and apt to break out in fever-spots of 
spite and pustules of egotism even in minds 
which should be beyond the infection of a 
malady so shameful — it is not under the 
influence of any such affliction that I take 
leave for once to call the notice of others to 
a charge brought by a contemporary journal 
against some verses of mine lately issued in 
these columns. It is merely to the manner 
in which this charge is brought and supported 
that I desire for the moment to advert. Thus 
runs the first indictment (Spectator, May 
24, 1873): — "Mr. Swinburne's revolting 
lines headed 'Dime'" (the lines in question 
were headed The Saviour of Society; but for 
reasons which will immediately be obvious 
it was necessary to falsify the title by sup- 
pression of the proper heading, which would 
at once have given the lie direct to the accusa- 
tion and insinuation following), "whatever 
else they mean or do not mean, certainly do 
50 



mean a deadly and indecent insult to the 
faith of the vast majority of Christians." 

To this I might most properly have re- 
turned the answer long since borrowed from 
Pascal by an eminent living dignitary of the 
Church of England, and applied to an offend- 
ing reviewer of one of his earliest and best 
works — Merit iris impudentissime. There 
can be no question of error or diversity of 
opinion. If the writer of the sentence above 
quoted had any meaning whatever, he meant 
to impress upon his reader's mind the belief 
that I had addressed in terms of insult and 
derision a person, divine or human, never 
known till now, to the best of my belief, as 
"the Saviour of Society." To support the 
insinuation, he was compelled to suppress 
the title of the verses, which would have 
shown beyond possibility of mistake exactly 
what "they mean or do not mean." But 
this would have plucked out the sting from 
his calumny, and reduced it from a pointed 
slander to a pointless falsehood. For if to 
attack the Saviour of Society be indeed to 
offer a deadly and indecent insult to the 
faith of the vast majority of Christians, it 
would seem to follow that the vast majority 
of Christians must identify — I am really 
51 



reluctant to write the words — must identify 
Jesus Christ with Louis Bonaparte. For to 
the latter name alone has that blasphemous 
title ever hitherto been applied. If it be 
applicable also to the former, we must sup- 
pose that in the new Gospel of the Liberal 
Puritans it is written how Christ fell a victim 
to his zeal for the cause of order, of privilege, 
of established religion and social conserva- 
tism; overthrown in a gallant but hopeless 
struggle to maintain things as they were, 
dying in defence of orthodox institutions 
against the aggression of such demagogues 
as Pilate and Herod, the champions of the 
mob, and Annas and Caiaphas, the high 
priests of revolution. And before this view 
can be established, it will at least be neces- 
sary to recast in some not inconsiderable 
degree the existing records of history or 
tradition. 

I come now to the method of defence or 
apology attempted by my calumniator in 
answer to the refutation of his implied charge 
that I had sought to vilify, not the name of 
Bonaparte, but the name of Christ. I have 
written, he maintains, "a gross parody on 
the most sacred of subjects." The parody, 
gross enough in all conscience, was made by 
52 



the partisans of the Church and the Empire 
at the time of their alliance in conspiracy 
against every principle that makes human 
order and society possible, and different from 
the anarchy and abjection of beasts wild or 
tame by the influences of reason and good 
faith, of law and liberty. To expose the 
grossness and absurdity of the insult or 
parody implied in the titles "Messiah of 
Order" and "Saviour of Society," I thought 
good to carry the parallel a little further in 
an ironical address or form of prayer to be 
offered by his worshippers to the new Re- 
deemer of their kind. I must repeat, if this 
irony be an offence to the vast majority of 
Christians, the vast majority of Christians 
must see no offence in the parallel itself at 
which the irony is aimed. In that case I am 
content to share the heretical view of even 
an infinitesimal Christian minority, which 
does see offence, and much offence, in this 
parallel. But I believe this implied imputa- 
tion on the majority to be a libel as gross and 
as ridiculous as the calumny forged against 
myself. 

It is of a piece with his first plan of attack 
that the editor "should not choose to print 
the sonnets in his columns," and should 
53 



thus be unwillingly compelled to "leave our 
readers without the means of judging of 
the justice of a remark which we think was 
mild rather than harsh." There is, as I 
have shown, no room for opinion in the 
matter. The remark was neither mild nor 
harsh: it was false. A truth may be mild or 
harsh according to the time and manner of 
its expression; but I am not sufficiently an 
expert in falsehood to know whether or not 
there may be milder and harsher varieties 
of calumnious fiction; nor do I greatly care 
to determine the species and difference of 
any particular blossom of the generic order 
of falsehood. It is enough for me to observe 
that the same accuser who durst not print 
the proper title of the verses attacked, lest 
it should of itself confute his accusation, 
dare6 not now print the verses themselves 
side by side with the slander which their 
contact would expose. He can allow, he 
says, for the discontent which he assumes 
that I must feel with him and with myself 
(for having done each of us after his kind I 
trust I am scarcely so unreasonable); and I 
can allow for the considerations which induce 
him to shrink from a confrontation which 
would suffice to decide the question between 
54 



my text and his comment. I am willing 
indeed to admit that he does well and wisely 
on his own account to evade it, and take 
refuge in a final impertinence of conjecture 
as to my present opinion of himself which 
recalls the Rev. Charles Honeyman's prayer- 
ful trust that the dupe who had detected 
him in swindling "might one day think better 
of him." I cannot share that happy gift of 
confidence so far as to hope that The Spec- 
tator will cease to regard me as "a profane 
and vulgar companion"; I am but too 
conscious of the great gulf fixed between 
the aristocratic urbanity of his style and 
the plebeian inelegance of my own; but the 
question between us, happily for me, is not 
one of "blood and culture," but of humble 
and vulgar fact. And although it may be a 
matter of small moment to decide what is 
or is not the meaning and the purpose of 
my sonnets, it is of more importance to 
enquire whether a writer even of the rank of 
the editor of The Spectator may with impunity 
so far abuse the advantage of his pure and 
polished rhetoric, and chaste and classic 
organ of patrician piety, as to make it the 
instrument of false witness even against one 
so obscure and lowly as myself. The journal 
55 



of clerical liberalism, emulous perhaps of 
the laurels won in his campaign against the 
shallow infidelity of Strauss by the heaven- 
born minister whom it serves, has laid itself 
out of late to win golden opinions from the 
Catholic party by its advocacy of the rights 
of the priesthood to use, at all times and in 
all places, to what end they please, that 
liberty which it is the avowed aim of the 
Catholic Church to root out from the face 
of the earth; and whether or not it may be 
a fruit of this holy alliance I do not care to 
ask, but I doubt whether a disciple more 
perfect and more dexterous in the combined 
arts of " suppressio veri" and " suggestio falsi" 
was ever turned out from any school of 
casuistry than the leading journalist of Lib- 
eral Puritanism. One thing, however, he has 
yet to learn from his fellow-pupils of Sanchez 
and Liguori; never, while he has a chance 
of using either of the invaluable methods 
above mentioned, to go astray into the 
straight path of a direct assertion. In the 
crooked ways which it must be at once safer 
and more natural for calumny to follow, he 
may more reasonably hope by the help of sup- 
pression and suggestion to evade the other- 
wise inevitable chastisement which even the 
56 



feeblest hand that does but unmask a false- 
hood is competent by that very act to inflict 

on it. a /^ c 

A. G. Swinburne. 

With this the controversy closed. 



57 



OF LIBERTY AND LOYALTY 



PREFACE 

The MS. of "Of Liberty and Loyalty" 
was found among Swinburne's papers, with- 
out any record of the date or cause of its 
composition. But internal evidence proves 
it to belong to the agitated times of the two 
Reform Bills, Mr. Gladstone's and Mr. 
Disraeli's, of the Jamaica riots and Gover- 
nor Eyre, of the Hyde Park meetings and 
the Westminster election. It was written, 
it is probable, early in that tumultuous 
period. Carlyle's rectorial address at Edin- 
burgh was pronounced on the 2nd of April, 
1866; Ruskin's Crown of Wild Olive was 
published in book form on May 14 of the 
same year. These events are likely to have 
roused Swinburne to a moderate reply. 
Carlyle had told the students at Edinburgh, 
"Don't be at all too desirous of success; be 
loyal and modest." Against the strong 
defenders of liberty, such as John Bright, 
Tom Hughes and John Stuart Mill, there 
arose Carlyle and Ruskin vociferously pro- 
claiming that liberty was void without 
loyalty; that liberty is, in fact, nothing but 
the power of doing what the law permits, 
61 



id quod jure licet. Ruskin, in an appendix 
of eleven notes, had drawn special attention 
to Carlyle's "Friedrich II," the sixth and 
last volume of which had appeared in 1865. 
Of this history Swinburne speaks here with 
an enthusiasm which reflects the joy with 
which we lay down an admirable book 
without having had time to give it its final 
position in our judgment. 

Throughout his career, Swinburne watched 
the masterful genius of Carlyle with a sort 
of painful fascination. He could not keep 
his eyes or his ears off "the stormy sophist 
with his voice of thunder," who represented 
the extremity of disapproval for most things 
which Swinburne held dear, and who yet 
attracted him irresistibly. Not until the 
publication of the Reminiscences did he 
finally throw off the recurrent influence of 
Carlyle, and determined to regard him for 
the future simply as "the dead snake.' ' 

Edmund Gosse 



62 



OF LIBERTY AND LOYALTY 
By Algernon Charles Swinburne 

There are certain words which to most 
men have long since become as watchwords, 
and which, in consequence, it never occurs 
to them to define or to defend; we cannot 
conceive of the principles embodied in them 
as standing in need of definition or defence. 
It is perhaps well that we should hear these 
principles now and then impugned and 
decried, with violence or with temperance 
as it may happen; that by the discussion or 
the declamation of their opponents we, who 
desire still to hold fast by them till their 
fallacy be matter of plain proof, may be 
led once for all to enquire what grounds we 
have had all along for assuming them hitherto 
to be indisputable and inexpugnable truth. 
Unassailed and unexamined, accepted and 
assumed too long on trust, the noblest of 
human words and creeds are apt in time to 
become mere catchwords. 

We have now living among us here in 

England two men of such rare and noble 

genius as to command in some measure the 

reverence and gratitude of all not ignoble 

63 



Englishmen. Both of these men, the younger 
avowedly as the elder's disciple, have con- 
stantly put forth, but of late years on a 
regularly graduated scale of increasing vehe- 
mence, opinions on social and political 
matters which stand in direct and angry an- 
tagonism to those accepted by most modern 
thinkers hitherto held in honour of men. 
And not on mere matters of the day, econo- 
mics or polemics of the hour; but on those 
radical principles which lie deep at the very 
fountain heads of human faith and action. 
Both of these men — the most malignant 
fool in scribbling England would hardly (I 
presume) undertake to deny it — have given 
ample and memorable proof of their care 
and thought for working and suffering men, 
that somewhat more of justice and less of 
injustice may fall to their lot in life. And 
that wrong may give place to right, and that 
wretchedness may give place to blessedness, 
they warn us with all the force of their great 
eloquence that we must begin by giving up 
certain fancies, by casting from us and tread- 
ing under foot certain beliefs which hitherto 
men who have sought and striven after this 
same end have held as most precious and 
necessary. There is no redemption for the 
64 



great wrongs of the world in the principle 
of liberty, of equality or of brotherhood. 
Freedom is pernicious to men, equality 
impossible, fraternity delusive. By obedi- 
ence instead of self-reliance, by drill instead 
of devotion, by force and not by faith, the 
world must find its redemption. Into the 
new heaven of this new earth there is no 
entrance for free men. We are to be de- 
livered out of the wilderness at last — and 
redeemed into the house of bondage. 

I do not enquire whether this ideal of 
theirs be a practical one or a merely senti- 
mental: thus far at least it is logical, appre- 
hensible. But now we come to a point where 
it seems to my poor apprehension to lose all 
coherence or consistency with itself. We 
who have just learned that liberty must give 
place, in all our thoughts, words, and works, 
to the empire of passive obedience, are now 
told that of all lessons remaining to learn, 
of all articles of faith remaining to embrace, 
the most noble and necessary is the principle 
of loyalty. We are to be loyal and resign 
the notion of equality, the dream of muti- 
nous blockheads who ask, " Is not one man as 
good as another?" We are to be loyal and 
resign the notion of liberty, a thing not to be 
65 



found in nature, except as the property of a 
dead leaf loosened from its bough, "whose 
liberty has come with its corruption." 

Now I do not for an instant dispute the 
truth so eloquently enforced by our preachers 
of obedience, that the highest spiritual 
quality, the noblest property of mind a man 
can have, is this of loyalty; that a man with 
no loyalty in him, with no sense of love or 
reverence or devotion due to something out- 
side and above his poor daily life, with its 
pains and pleasures, profits and losses, is in 
as evil a case as man can be; that a "muti- 
nous blockhead," though never so "free" 
from restraints, is not a beautiful type of 
person, and his kind of liberty by no means 
a lovely or enviable kind. In other words, 
that personal freedom by itself will not 
suffice for our redemption; and indeed I 
have never fallen in with anyone who sup- 
posed it would. There needs no ghost come 
from the grave, no prophet thunder from the 
housetops, to tell us this. 

"Liberty," said the greatest living apostle 
of liberty a few weeks since, "is not an end, 
but a mean." The end is that right shall be 
done and wrong undone ; but without the mean, 
there are those who think that we shall hardly 
66 



reach the end. It is doubtless quite possible 
that a freeman should not be loyal; but it is 
quite impossible that a slave should be. 

In the one great Epic which the ages since 
Milton have produced, the History of Fred- 
erick the Great, there is an episode as hard 
to forget as anything of Homer's, an episode 
not of mere fact, but true as the divinest 
fiction of Achilles or Lear; and memorable, 
not because it actually happened in this 
world on a certain day, but because the 
spirit and significance of it is immortal and 
precious as though it had been conceived 
in the imagination of Aeschylus or of Shake- 
speare. I cannot here transcribe it at length 
and assuredly I shall not attempt to retell 
it in other than the words of Carlyle. It is 
that story of the regiment which, for some 
failure in duty or appearance of failure, was 
disgraced by the King and deprived of its 
colours; which took its punishment loyally, 
and after biding its time with due and tacit 
patience, redeemed its place, not by dint of 
plaint or remonstrance or any noise of pro- 
test, but by heroic action in the next field 
offered it. 

How the great King gave back its honours, 
with what noble words they were restored, 
67 



and with what noble tears received, the 
historian has told us in his royal manner, to 
such effect that it was scarcely needful for 
him to append a bitter word of commentary 
by way of indication that such men as these 
are of higher mould than mutineers, and 
their loyalty a worthier thing than the 
egotistic clamour of rebellious blockheads 
demanding aloud, "Am not I as good as 
you, then?" Good wine needs no bush, 
and great acts no remark beyond the relation. 
There are men, we must suppose, who can 
read this record of Mr. Carlyle's book with 
no sudden stir of the blood, with no instant 
heat of loyal sympathy and ardour of passion- 
ate reverence for the great thing recorded; 
these are not in my mind the most admirable 
or enviable of men. But what is it then that 
we find here to kindle reverence and sym- 
pathy? Is it perfection of discipline and 
drill? Is it passive obedience or unreasoning 
submission? By no means, it appears to 
me. It is something as incompatible with 
the passivity of a serf as with the discontents 
of a mutineer; something that no drill can 
teach and no discipline ensure; something 
that can be had only as a free gift given of 
a man's free will. 

. 68 



Inasmuch as there was in the action of 
these men this element of liberty, so far was 
it admirable, and no further. It is not what 
they had to do that we honour them for 
doing; not for showing the obedience they 
were bound to show, for keeping the disci- 
pline they were bound to keep; it is not for 
any quality that a bondsman may have in 
common with a freeman. As they were 
military machines drilled to utmost perfection 
of disciplined obedience, we see that they 
may have been serviceable in their day, not 
that they may remain admirable to us now; 
but as they were men capable of heroic love 
and faith in a man they found heroic, we 
find them still worth all we can give of 
honour. But we find this too on reading 
further — that no less of our admiration is 
claimed for the "obedient" soldiers of Russia, 
whose main quality is the absence of any- 
thing that serves to distinguish man from 
beast or beast from machine; the excellence 
of their obedience being that it is not given 
freely of their own choice, that it depends 
in no wise upon any such condition as human 
conscience or honour or love or faith; that 
the obedient creature sees no alternative to 
obedience, makes no election, accepts no 
69 



duty, conceives no sacrifice; that it has no 
will to exercise by submission or by rebellion, 
no voluntary force to use in loyal service or 
in loyal resistance; that there is in it no 
human faculty at all, but only the faculty 
to obey. 

That this is the admirable thing in it, we 
are not left to conclude by any inference of 
our own; the merit of mechanical or material 
"obedience," the supreme value of utter 
passivity, of absolute abjection, is set before 
us in stark nakedness of dogmatic teaching. 
There is no meaning in words if this be not 
the doctrine of Mr. Carlyle's Russian gospel. 
While we were yet under the banner of a 
Cromwell or a Frederick, we might well lose 
sight of the real end and ultimate significance 
of this evangel; we were content to follow 
in the fiery track of their historian, and see 
with his eyes the worth of military obedience, 
the beauty of human loyalty; but when we 
are summoned to serve under the Russian 
flag there is no more possibility of mistake. 
It is not heroism in the leader, it is not 
devotion in the follower, that is held up for 
our example. It is the mere brute fact of 
obedience, the naked negative quality of 
non-resistance. It is the action, or rather 
70 



it is the passion of a thing without will, with- 
out conscience, without choice. 

This, we are to believe, is the invaluable 
quality which has made Russia a nation, as 
the want of it has unmade Poland. This is 
what more than compensates for the want of 
culture, of art, of poetry; "they have not 
(forsooth) the gift of verses, but they have 
the gift of obedience." We will not now be 
too curious to enquire whether this quality 
has indeed made a nation, whether it ever 
can make one; whether it be not a thing 
utterly dependent on circumstances and 
conditions, good or bad, and laudable or 
damnable, as the case may be; the sign and 
seal in one man at one time of all that is 
noblest in man's nature, in another man at 
another time of all that is ignoblest. 

We have got rid then of any incongruous 
element of freedom; let us see what is left 
us for support, who have to live on the 
principle of mere obedience. And here, as 
Mr. Carlyle has said in another place of 
purity of life, so would I say of liberty: "Well 
if this goes, then I perceive that much else 
will have to go with it." And first and most 
inevitable of all we must be content to give 
up the principle of loyalty. That must be 
71 



put away utterly and at once and for ever. 
Wherever there is a grain of loyalty there is 
a glimpse of freedom. To be loyal in any 
sense imaginable we must have some liberty 
of will, some choice between love and hate, 
reverence or irreverence, assent or dissent, 
incompatible with the doctrine of pure sub- 
mission. According to this doctrine there 
must be no right, we are told, of refusal or 
compliance according to our own will or 
conscience; our part is obedience, and entire 
obedience, and nothing but obedience. And 
yet they tell us that loyalty is a virtue ! What 
virtue can there be in giving what we have 
no choice but to give? in yielding that which 
we have neither might nor right to withhold? 



72 



MEMORIAL VERSES 

ON THE DEATH OF RICHARD BURTON 






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MEMORIAL VERSES 

ON THE DEATH OF RICHARD BURTON 

Night or light is it now, wherein 

Sleeps, shut out from the wild world's din, 

Wakes, alive with a life more clear, 
One who found not on earth his kin? 

Sleep were sweet for awhile, were dear 
Surely to souls that were heartless here, 

Souls that faltered and flagged and fell, 
Soft of spirit and faint of cheer. 

A living soul that had strength to quell 
Hope the spectre and fear the spell, 

Clear-eyed, content with a scorn sublime 
And a faith superb, can it fare not well? 

(if e,' the shadow of wide-winged time, 
Cast from the wings that change as they 
climb, 
Life may vanish in death, and seem 
Less than the promise of last year's prime. 

But not for us is the past a dream 
Wherefrom, as light from a clouded stream, 

Faith fades and shivers and ebbs away, 
Faint as the moon if the sundawn gleam. 
75 



Faith, whose eyes in the low last ray 
Watch the fire that renews the day, 

Faith which lives in the living past, 
Rock-rooted, swerves not as weeds that 
sway. 

As trees that stand in the storm-wind fast 
She stands, unsmitten of death's keen blast, 
With strong remembrance of sunbright 
spring 
Alive at heart to the lifeless last. 

Night, she knows, may in no wise cling 
To a soul that sinks not and droops not 

wing, 
A sun that sets not in death's false night 
Whose Kingdom finds him not thrall but 

king. 

Souls there are that for soul's affright 
Bow down and cower in the sun's glad sight, 
Clothed round with faith that is one with 

fear, 
And dark with doubt of the live world's 

light. 

But him we hailed from afar or near 
As boldest born of his kinsfolk here 

And loved as brightest of souls that eyed 

Life, time, and death with unchangeful cheer. 

76 



A wider soul than the world was wide, 
Whose praise made love of him one with 
pride, 
What part has death or has time in him, 
Who rode life's lists as a god might ride? 

While England sees not her old praise dim, 
While still her stars through the world's 
night swim, 
A fame outshining her Raleigh's fame, 
A light that lightens her loud sea's rim, 

Shall shine and sound as her sons proclaim 
The pride that kindles at Burton's name. 

And joy shall exalt their pride to be 
The same in birth, if in soul the same. 

But we that yearn for a friend's face, — we 
Who lack the light that on earth was he, — 
Mourn, though the light be a quenchless 
flame 
That shines as dawn on a tideless sea. 

Algernon Charles Swinburne 



77 



JUN 1! 1918 



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